


Galatea, or the Modern Pygmalion

by mitsein, seinmit



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, Canon Compliant, Captivity, F/M, Ironic Bible Quotes, Memory Loss, References to Frankenstein, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 10:44:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20208454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitsein/pseuds/mitsein, https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/pseuds/seinmit
Summary: The Winter Soldier was not used to staying out of cryo this long. His normal missions were a couple days of amphetamines and sniper’s nests, finished off with a wet hose before going into the ice. In an effort to keep him from murdering quite so many Hydra personnel while they needed him awake, they built him a girl.





	Galatea, or the Modern Pygmalion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NekoMida](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NekoMida/gifts).

> Thank you so much for the interesting prompt! I hope you like it! The song this is based on is Renegade 歌詞 by STEREO DIVE FOUNDATION. For the curious, translated lyrics are here.
> 
> With apologies to Mary Shelley and George Bernard Shaw & great appreciation for G.

> The monster saw my determination in my face and gnashed his teeth in the impotence of anger. “Shall each man,” cried he, “find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! You may hate, but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness for ever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.”
> 
> from Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

* * *

By this time, they had developed a little routine. The girl had begged for books to keep her interested while he was taken from the cell to train the other Winter Soldiers. She’d tidy their meager belongings and stack books carefully against the back corner. Behind those books was where he was hiding the bits and pieces of things that he was able to collect in his relative freedom throughout the base. It wasn’t strategic, not really. He compulsively picked things up. A candy wrapper that had missed the trash can was his most recent acquisition. He smelled it and the sweet milky chocolate filled his sinuses. He even liked the glint of light off the metallic crinkle; it was almost like jewelry. They didn’t have many luxuries like this here, and never for him.

He tried to have her smell, but she smiled at him and tapped her nose and said, “You know this doesn’t work too well.” 

When she did that, he couldn’t help but reach out to press his fingers against the side of her nose, feeling the strange rough velvet of her skin. It was matte, preternaturally even, and lined with thick black stitches like maggots dipping in and out of her flesh. He was fond of the way her skin seemed to cover her inside and keep it in with more certainty than his own. 

He shifted his palm so that it cupped her cheek, rubbing his thumb against the bump of her orbital bone. His skin against hers seemed filmy and translucent. It made him feel insubstantial, like the membrane barrier between him and the world could dissolve at any moment. He had veins pressing out against his skin, threatening blood. Her skin had the flat evenness of paint, as if it was dried and reconstituted.

She leaned her face into his hand and smiled, pressing a sideways kiss against the meat of his thumb. 

“I’m glad it smells nice to you,” she said, pulling away. She prevented him from seeing her face, making him frown and reach out to drag her gently back. She had a sweet scent herself, of rot and overripe fruit and formaldehyde. It had been the first thing he noticed: she smelled like the dead. 

He wrapped his arms around her waist and rocked them a little, back and forth, on the edge of dancing. He kissed the part of her dark hair and asked her to tell him a story. 

She laughed and said, “Well. What I was reading was Genesis. So in the beginning God gave the world light and then a little later, there was Adam and Eve.”

The only beginning he had before her was waking up from the ice and it never reached an ending. 

When she was first thrown in his cell, he was strung out from weeks of not sleeping, still stinking of blood from the last couple techs he killed, and standing straight to attention precisely two inches away from the back wall. He had been too erratic to teach the others as was intended. 

Erratic was his inability to sleep. It was the dry itch of his eyelids and the pupils that felt like paper. It was the welling tides of strange emotion that came and went in his chest, inexplicable and beyond his control. It was the fizzing hot rage that drove him to rip the throat out of a man who was just trying to bandage his wound. 

They pushed her into the room like disposing of a corpse. She crumpled to the floor and his nostrils flared like an animal, unfamiliar with the must of her scent. 

He just stared. His long black hair was draped over his face, greasy and dirty. They had not been able to remove him from his cell for servicing for days. His gut was clenched around a hard knot of nothing. They had been trying to starve him into submission, but every new physical sensation drove his resentment of the guards higher and higher. There was fire licking underneath his skin, consuming his fat and muscle and leaving him empty. He was hollowed out and filled with anger that he did not fully understand. Every new bit of pain just removed more of his flesh and made space for the rage. 

As he looked at this woman-creature, he considered if he wanted to kill her. It would be easy, he knew. He was good at killing. 

But she had looked right back at him like he was a person and she was a person. He could see himself in the similarities and differences between them— her swell of breast, his metal arm, their shared dark hair, the part of their upper lip, the gleam of intelligence even in eyes dulled by pain. The shock of recognition was enough to make him catch his breath and hold it. 

That had given her enough time to stand up and start investigating the cell. 

“You need more things in here,” she said. “If I’m to stay with you. They promised me I could try to be a person again. “

Her voice had been nothing but breath and the wheeze of a broken down wind instrument. He could barely hear her. 

“Again?” he said. “You remember?”

He said it in English, for some reason. She frowned at him and he repeated himself in Russian. 

Her face cleared. “A patchwork,” she said. “Stitched together strangely. Want me to tell you about it?”

And then she had, taking over his life with a cheerful stubbornness that made something old and scarred over in his chest ache.

He felt a gentle pinch on his side. 

“That’s a good story,” he said, dutifully. 

“You weren’t paying any attention,” she accused. 

“Eve was punished for curiosity,” he said, instantly. “Eating at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

“You remembered that,” she said. “I didn’t say that.”

Her voice blended reproach and joy and it made him squeeze her tight once more before letting her go. 

“Okay, Adam,” she said. “What else do you remember?”

She washed his hair in the bare basin in the corner and he told her about fragments of images— the fragrant smell of smoke, colored light dancing off dust in the air, a small body whispering something that almost made him laugh, only he couldn’t laugh, he wasn’t allowed. He wasn’t allowed then or now, because laughter wasn’t what you did when the powerful were watching. 

Her fingers picked through the knots in his dark hair and he felt his entire body relax. It was only in the absence that he recognized how hard he had been clenching his teeth and the tension radiating up his jaw. 

She was humming a little under her breath as she worked. He hadn’t heard the song before, but he drifted off listening to it. 

Their peace was interrupted by a loud bang against the metal bars of their cell. The Soldier leapt up in one movement of immense core strength, going from bent over backward to crouched and ready immediately. His upper lip curled away from his teeth. 

“Down, boy,” the guard said. “The colonel is just coming to see the results of our experiment.”

That wasn’t reassuring. He felt the ice of cryo in his gut and he tensed himself in wary readiness. 

The gentle touch of her hand against the small of his back did not make him jump, but it felt wrong and unnatural when he was in this heightened, attentive state. 

“Why don’t the two of you get yourself ready to greet your superiors and explain how hard you’re working for the state, hmm?” the guard said. 

The Soldier nodded, short and sharp. He had noticed, lately, that the men had been speaking to him in extended sentences and with more complex syntax than they had previously. It was unsettling, to be spoken to like a man instead of a dog. 

The guard tapped his baton against the bars again, lighter than before, and the Soldier shifted the girl around so that she was tucked under his arm. He leaned his head down to press his lips right above his ear and whispered, “We must act empty.”

“Like a pair of dolls,” she said, just as quiet. “Okay, Adam.”

The name felt wrong, a twist in his stomach, but names were important. He kissed her skin again and said, “Eve.” 

He let her go when he heard the hard tap of boots coming against concrete. He wore boots when he was training, but now that he was more docile and they were able to, they had him take them off when he was done. His bare toes curled against the cold floor and he clasped his wrists behind his back. Parade rest. The girl—Eve, she half-copied his pose. One arm was straight and the other hooked around it, her hips cocked a little and tilting herself toward him. She looked girlish and young. He imagined her in a sundress, skin tone pink and lively. 

He lifted up his bare foot and nudged her calf with it.

“Stand up straight,” he said.

She shot him a sidewise look but did as he asked. 

In a few moments, the colonel and entourage came up the bars. 

“Open it,” he barked. 

The guard visibly hesitated and the Soldier had to press his lips together to hide his smile. 

“Sir. He is very dangerous, sir,” he said. 

The colonel rolled his eyes. 

“What is this other monster even for if not to keep him calm?” He unholstered his pistol with a shrug and pointed it at the girl’s head. The Soldier felt a hot flush of rage, but he kept very still. 

“You’re going to be good, yes?” said the colonel, making careful eye contact. The Soldier dipped his chin ever so slightly. 

Everyone moved slowly, carefully, into the Soldier’s cell. With hand signals, the colonel directed one of his men to grab the girl. He tugged her close and pressed the gun right up against her temple. 

The man laughed a little and said, “It’s a miracle you can get it up, Soldier, when she smells like this. Phew, ever tried fucking a corpse?”

The Soldier’s back was so tense he felt the strain of his own muscles pulling his bones. But now the colonel’s pistol was on his own head. Not so close as they had the gun on the girl: they weren’t that stupid. 

“Kneel, Soldier,” the colonel said, almost kindly. And when he slowly dipped to his knees, the colonel jerked his chin and directed his men to search the cell. 

The Soldier stayed on high alert, but he closed his eyes. He did not want to see the tiny place they had managed to make a home overturned by these men. He did not want to see the girl looking so scared and him helpless to stop it. 

He heard the rustling and movement of men and objects. There wasn’t much to get through; it didn’t take long. 

“It’s mostly books, some clothes, a little soap, and then some trash. The only suspicious thing is this, sir.”

At this, the Soldier’s eyes snapped open. He’d been careful not to take any weapons. He did not want to take anything that they could get punished for. 

The guard was holding a cheap stub of a pencil. The Soldier had taken it out of the trash when he had seen it, and they carefully kept it sharpened by rubbing it against the rough concrete. 

The colonel raised his eyebrows. 

“Interesting. What are you writing, Soldier?” 

He stared at the colonel and kept his face carefully, entirely blank. The colonel kept the pencil between two fingers like it was filthy and risked getting dirt on his spotless uniform. The Soldier kept his eyes straight ahead, but the colonel started slowly walking around the cell, looking. 

“If nothing else, our own history should teach us that literacy is a dangerous thing. The Tsars ruled for centuries and Lenin defeated them with a couple of pamphlets and some excellent ideas,” he said. He slowed in front of the little stack of books and then stopped. He leaned down and grabbed the biggest one. The Bible. 

“Who is giving you this reading material?” he said, sounding amused. “Someone has far too much of a sense of humor and not nearly enough reverence for the appropriate source of power. Who needs this bourgeois reactionary ideology?” 

He started leafing through the onion-skin pages, going slow enough that he could scan the page, but skipping several every time. There was a chance, the Soldier thought. There was a chance he’d miss— 

“Ah,” the colonel said. “I should have known. _In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job._” 

The Soldier felt despair. It felt a little like exhaustion, his body unable to hold itself together any more and falling into component pieces. He was going to disintegrate, come apart, vanish into a puddle of viscera without any coherence or connection. This was it, he knew it. He knew this certainty came from a past he did not fully remember and countless times he had forgotten before. 

The girl was stiff with rage. He let his eyes fall on her loved figure and imagined the thick black stitches across her skin as words, the words she had written for him in the Bible. Four sisters, she had written next to _three daughters_; March next to _birthdays_, a snowy train and a long drop next to where God commanded Job to Satan’s hands but told him that he had to keep the man alive. 

“Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?” the colonel quoted. “Oh, Soldier. You know the answer to that. You know what you are for. I see our little experiment has backfired. You have become biddable, but in the same poisonous way as normal soldiers are.”

The dread in the Soldier’s body—flowing through his veins like blood that the girl didn’t have— surged upward and he went to tear these people apart. But the guard holding the girl squeezed her hard enough she cried out and he stopped, stricken. 

The colonel laughed again.

“Well, at least she has use a little longer. Soldier, if you come quietly, we will keep her unharmed. You are entirely our thing, you know that. But she can keep her mind. If not, we will snap her neck.” 

The Soldier was bound, then, and he almost hated her for it. Her dark eyes were heavy on him as they walked out of the cell and down the hall. They cuffed him with his hands behind his back. It was out of the principle of the thing, more than anything else. He could kill them all. 

They took him to the chair. He knew that was where they had to be going. They still needed him to train the other winter soldiers. Whatever benefit his memory of the training process was giving them, they clearly now thought it was outweighed by the risks. 

“Sit,” the colonel said and the Soldier sat. They buckled him in. 

His breath was even. There was nothing to be done other than watch the girl as long as possible. Eve. She had beautiful hair. His eyes kept going to it, shiny and dark. Her face and body revealed her terror in any number of ways at the moment, but her hair was familiar and beautiful. 

“Adam,” she said, in a choked voice. 

“Bucky,” he corrected. He felt some amount of peace. It hurt now, but she would remember his name. He didn’t even remember it, not until this exact moment. Someone would remember that he had been a person, even if only briefly, and who could ask for more than that?

The colonel rolled his eyes and struck the girl with his pistol. She dropped to the ground. The Soldier surged forward, roaring—

“Enough with this nonsense,” he heard, and then nothing but pain.

* * *

He hurt. All the muscles of his body were twitching arrhythmically and he felt a burning, piercing pain up and down his spine. 

“Soldier,” he heard. 

He opened his eyes, somehow knowing that was him. 

“Good morning, Soldier,” the man said. “You will serve us well.” 

The Soldier nodded. He did not have anything else to do. 

“Look at this creature,” he said, nudging a woman on the floor with his boot. She was crying. It sounded strange and hoarse, with no voiced sound. “What would you do if I ordered you to kill her?” 

The Soldier shrugged. “Kill her.” 

The woman sobbed and it sounded like she was choking. The man smiled. 

“Don’t worry. I made a promise that she would be unharmed. We will put her to work elsewhere—she really is a miracle of modern science.” 

The Soldier felt unease, but his mind was unable to keep it in focus and it constantly flowed away like water. 

* * *

> Yet if you devote your heart to him  
and stretch out your hands to him,  
if you put away the sin that is in your hand  
and allow no evil to dwell in your tent,  
then, free of fault, you will lift up your face;  
you will stand firm and without fear.  
You will surely forget your trouble,  
recalling it only as waters gone by.  
from Job 11:13-16.

**Author's Note:**

> Two thoughts: 
> 
> First, I choose to believe that Eve concocts a plan and breaks them out of there and Bucky remembers her and everything else, but I wanted to keep this canon compliant. And unfortunately, canon compliance is pretty shitty for Bucky Barnes and those who love him. 
> 
> Second, I know that the version of the Bible they are quoting is not the one they would actually be quoting in the appropriate timeline, but they're all speaking Russian and I refused on principle to find the appropriate Russian version and literally translate it into English, so you are getting NIV.


End file.
